USSR | 09:00 | 1982

Using his personal connections, Kondrat borrows a pair of oxen from the collective farm — not for any socially useful purpose, but to conceal his illicit moonshine production in the forest. However, a barrel of fermenting mash is accidentally discovered by a pack of wolves.

The protagonist — a crafty, stout man in an embroidered shirt who sings Ukrainian folk songs while attempting to exploit collective property for personal gain — embodies a stereotypical colonial image of the Ukrainian that was widely propagated in Socialist Realist art. Drunken Wolves was one of the earliest productions of the Artistic Animation Studio. Like The Adventures of Perets, it was produced in both Russian and Ukrainian and exists only in this bilingual version. Here, Ukrainian is reduced to a decorative, bucolic embellishment, vividly illustrating the language policy of the period.